20th century board wargaming traditionally turns to Charles S. Roberts as its founding father. Roberts released Tactics, Tactics II, and Gettysburg in the late 1950s, launched Avalon Hill, and the rest, as they say, is history. But a recent reading of Harry Pearson's new book, Achtung Schweinhund! (Little Brown, 2007), clued me in to some games that were on the market decades before Roberts'. They're mostly generic in theme, but then so was Tactics II.

Some will object that none of these games are sophisticated or historically specific enough to be called proper wargames. Perhaps, but rather than arguing about the label I'm mostly interested in just collecting a bit of early gaming history. Enjoy, and feel free to add on--let's use 1960 as the cut off date.

A World War I themed game from 1915. Played on a grid superimposed over a map of the Western Front area. The object is to place a piece on the opponent's "capital" square at the opposite corner of the board. There are three types of pieces: artillery, infantry, and cavalry.

(1938) "The game of Strategy is played upon a board representing a battlefield, between players who move pieces representing the soldiers and guns of opposing armies across the board and against each other in maneuvers resembling warfare. Each player is equipped at the beginning of the game with an 'army' of twenty playing pieces, sixteen representing soldiers and four representing guns. The board is divided into sectors, if a gun is in a sector, it controls the sector and captures all opposing pieces in the sector. The object is to capture the enemy capital while preventing the enemy from doing the same. A roll of the dice determines how many pieces a player may move in a turn."

1951. "This is a Stratego-like game that's actually two games, an army game and a navy game. Pieces are set up on a board in a manner similar to Stratego, but rather than being linear (numerical values), the units have a rock-paper-scissors relationship. i.e. the tank unit is superior to infantry and engineers but is inferior to aircraft, artillery, and mine units."